Category Archives: Rush

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Here’s my bio for a forthcoming book about The Simpsons (McFarland, 2018), in which I have a chapter called “Be Sharp: The Simpsons & Music.” (I may or may not still try and publish an entire book on the subject.)

Durrell Bowman has a Ph.D. in Musicology (UCLA, 2003), a Certificate in Computer Applications Development (2010), and a Master of Library and Information Science (2018). For about a decade, he developed and taught music history courses as an adjunct or visiting instructor at seven institutions all across North America. He has also worked as a semi-professional choral singer, built websites, and presented numerous conference papers, including several on music in The Simpsons. In addition, he has written books, book chapters, journal articles, media and book reviews, reference entries, and program notes. His books are: Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), and Rush and Philosophy: Heart and Mind United (co-editor and three chapters, Open Court Publishing, 2011). He hails from what Homer refers to as “America Junior” and agrees with Marge that “grad students just made a terrible life choice.”

As Durrell Bowman (no relation) has noted, the piece “features a substantial amount of electronically generated sounds and sound effects, frequent metrical complexities (28% in asymmetrical meters alone), a large number of tonal areas (eight), a high degree of unison playing (35%), and one of the smallest sung proportions on Rush’s first five studio albums (16%).”

I’m experimenting with re-ripping parts of my 19,000-song iTunes library to test the files with n7player on my Android smart phone. That phone player is great (tag clouds of artist names, album covers shown for navigating, etc.), but it doesn’t like mixed file types and thus doesn’t pull AAC album groupings together properly with MP3s. So, I’m going to go with MP3s, because that format works as more of a standard across various platforms. Naturally, I’m starting with early Genesis, Peter Gabriel, and Rush! I’m tempted to put everything on the cloud with Google Play Music, which allows up to 50,000 songs for free. However, I don’t really like the idea of having to use that much data when not able to use WIFI. A compromise, I suppose, would be to keep selected things also offline on a 64 GB SD card. Yes, I’m a nerd!

I have done almost all of that work outside of conventional institutional contexts, so does that mean it doesn’t qualify as “public musicology”?! The Musicology Now (blog) version of the report is only slightly better, with one, highly-misleading sentence about my work: “Durrell Bowman (independent scholar) spoke of the challenges he has faced in the decade-long search for an academic position in musicology.” Both my assigned title of “independent scholar”–which I loathe, in favour of “public music historian”–and the falsely-reported subject matter of my paper–which is actually a whole bunch of things I have done in Public Musicology–may explain why the editor of the AMS newsletter decided to exclude it. Not surprisingly, the newsletter version of the report also excludes the following sentence: “Felicia Miyakawa (academic consultant) explained why she left a tenured position and chose to pursue public musicology.”

Here’s another excellent review of Experiencing Rush. I don’t agree with the reviewer that Rush “wanted to play essentially power pop.” However, he usually writes about death metal, so I suppose I can understand why the band’s music might seem that way to him! Otherwise, he really does completely get what I was trying to do.

Excerpts:

“Unlike most rock writers, he focuses on the output from the band rather than the discussion or buzz surrounding it … .”

“… intelligently look[s] into the music as a series of patterns and avoid[s] a deep immersion in music theory. As a result, Bowman compares abstract patterns found in the music to what they symbolize in life … .”

“… Bowman stands heads above the other writers on this topic.”

“… shows us what rock journalism could be — some of us would say should be — by digging into this band in the only way that honors their efforts, which is to take them seriously as people by investigating their art for what it attempts to express as a communication between artist and fans.”

“… avoid[s] academic-ese and also rock journalist ideo-jive, and instead look[s] at this band with an intelligent common-sense approach by picking apart each song to see what makes it work, both as a communications device and as an experience to enjoy. With the force of Rush fans behind him, hopefully Bowman can convince more of the music world to join him in this approach, which like the scientific method for materials should be the de facto standard for music.”

Excerpts: “While Bowman’s Rush reader need not be versed in theory, it nonetheless helps to keep one’s thinking cap on for his fascinating forage into what is arguably the world’s foremost intellectual rock band. … [T]he real success of the series is in the way the books rekindle readers’ interest in the subject matter by shedding light on the musical minutiae that might’ve escaped one’s attention till now. We knew these artists were good, but perhaps we couldn’t articulate precisely why. These authors effectively take reader / listeners undercover to view the musicians working all those levers behind the curtain. And it’s in their study and scholarly elucidation of all this musical sorcery that we arrive at a more profound understanding of (and appreciation for) the wizards responsible.”